MrHoatzin

For me piracy is a combination of convenience/laziness and moral objection/activism. I don't have a tidy moral reason that covers both of those aspects; I don't try to explain away my pirating ways as uniformly just and good. It is just messy and there is no easy way to conflate things. Lately I have only pirated games that I can no longer get anywhere legitimately, and big blockbusters sans demos that I was not sure would run on my machine. All of the ones that didn't run, I didn't play, and I didn't feel like a putz for blowing 60 dollars on something useless. Fallout 3 ran relatively well, so I bought a legit copy. Steam is probably the single most responsible thing for me not pirating games. If Netflix streaming worked on my Ubuntu laptop, which is the only thing plugged into my ancient SONY Trinitron, I would be all over that. I buy DVDs of all things that I would care to see more than once. I borrowed The Wire from the school library. It happened twice that I couldn't get the next season in line, it was checked out for weeks on end, so I torrented it. I wanted to buy the box set and was very close to doing it, but couldn't justify it since I didn't think I'd want to watch it again. It would be another thing clogging my bookshelf forever. I was borrowing the show from a public library anyway. I have no love for huge, lawyered-up institutions that would just fucking LOVE to be able to screen all of my internet all the time for the smallest shreds of even vaguely copyrighted and copyrightable stuff, regardless of any fair use. The copyright law as it exists and manifests itself in the corporation-loving western world is an anathema to progress, invention, propagation of culture and preservation of civil liberties. Copyright lasts too fucking long and is far too often used as a bludgeon to silence new creativity that builds up on old one, rather than to ensure artists can live off of their work. The studio/publisher/label model does provide a livelihood to a lot of little people, but is still unnecessarily top-heavy and machiavellian. Still, my kind of rationalizing is wholly at odds with stealing charity indie games. I have no explanation for those fuckers. People love a free lunch?

I dreamt that I played the game last night and it ran much smoother than The Penal Zone with all the bells and whistles.

Plus the shift from in-game to pre-rendered is always obnoxious and obvious. I just wish stuff was more optimized all around.

x_M9zWORBuA I especially like the wacky saxophone around the 1:31 mark.

Wellp! Problem solved. We have our Citizen Kane! Woo! We have attained the End of History. It's time to stop making games, I guess...

I wish there was a more granular way of tweaking the quality, for the geeks. I went looking for an ini file and didn't find one.

That is an incredibly stupid pun. Badly executed. Boo, pun, boo. Go pun somewhere else. Boo. de3WWGCK4N0

Those kids gave me goosebumps. I screamed and ran out of the room.

For optimum viewing pleasure watch stoned: ikcd3USx4VY

That is a crazy pile of stupid. :/

No, no, real thing. A really thick tie though.

Vote ZIVADINOVIC, he is tough on immigrating illegals!

I have somehow managed to resist this buying-games-I-can't-play-on-my-hardware kind of behavior for the most part. I think what is helping me not go crazy with game deals is that I am pretty sure my next new computer is going to be a mac and I don't know if I really care to own or install windows ever again. I still have a nice collection of games happening on Steam, so who knows...

Man, I totally remember stumbling upon that ship (I could probably pinpoint it on a map of Morrowind if you laid it out for me), I also remember leaving a third of my inventory in that ship, loading up on pillows and taking them all the way back to Balmora... only to have the pillow store dude not give a shit about all the pillows I was carrying. For whatever reason, those pillows were ridiculously heavy.I know what you're saying about exploration too. Morrowind was a lovely place to explore. I tried to go back recently, but it is so mind-blowingly ugly and not in an endearing kind of way some old school games are. Arx Fatalis was released within a few months of Morrowind and that game is still quite playable. I wish they would polish up the models a little, fix some of the bugs and re-release it as a netbook game. Of all the Bethesda games Fallout 3 is the least broken one. I never loaded up on super expensive loot that I couldn't unload anywhere and the barter system is neither an infuriating minigame nor a weird trial and error thing that encourages you to try to flatter people so that they would give you a better deal. Maybe my problem was that I'd always make sneaky klepto characters who got too good at stealing, to the point where no one could buy any of the stuff I could steal. Fallout fixed a lot of that. There was always an incentive to drag loot back to the store to sell it. The monsters didn't level-up with you, etc. etc. By far, my favorite part of the game was that it was set in "the real world" which allowed them to do more subtle and affecting things with the story that fantasy is generally not good for. For example, setting the thing in a familiar city wherein around every corner there could be a familiar landmark, the escaped slaves having the decapitated head of Abraham Lincoln in their hideout, getting to retrieve a Stradivarius violin, etc. All of these could've been done in a fantasy setting, but they would have to be re-digested into the world and explained, and as a result it wouldn't be as powerful. Does that make sense? So whatever, it is a little drab. It wins at a shitton of other levels.

I'm supposed to be closing on a house* today at three (it is 12:50 right now) and I still don't know how much money exactly to bring with me. I am waiting to be told so that I can go to the bank and get a banker's check for the exact amount. I've been waiting for two days now. On the upside, I will have a house of my own this afternoon! I've been doing all these entirely too bourgeois things lately: getting married, getting a house, a dog, contemplating gardening, joining the home owners association. I actually declared myself a Republican in the Texas primary so that I could try to unseat Rick Perry (that didn't go well). I got a paper that says "Stevan Zivadinovic voted on DATE at PLACE" and there is a huge red stamp over the whole thing that says "REPUBLICAN". This is the first vote I ever cast, what with having become a citizen only last November. It feels weird. :∫ * "Closing" is the final stage in the extremely technocratic and convoluted process of buying a house in the US, a process that requires a blessing and a ream of bureaucracy from about a dozen different experts: two realtors, general inspection dude, termite inspection dude, electrician, HVAC dude, loan agent, loan underwriter, home owners insurance agent, a couple of people at the title company, some lady at HUD and I am probably forgetting some clerk or other that I didn't actually have to deal with directly.

Awwww

I never bothered to sit down and subtract some numbers. How long has it been in the world of Fallout 3 since the world was nuked to hell?

Oblivion's forests were uniformly phthalo green. At least Fallout's drab wasteland had the decency to be coherently monochromatic. Morrowind, as ugly as it was (and it aged even worse), had some really nice variation to the landscape.

What does he do for a living? Since he resurfaced in the public eye with Grumpy Gamer he seems to have spent a couple of years squatting at a spare desk at Double Fine, then being the spiritual leader for Hothead on the Penny Arcade games for fifteen minutes, then he moved to Canada to actually work on Deathspank for a few hours, and now he is back home... back to whatever he does or does not do for a living... The new screenshots remind me of what little we saw of the Good & Evil game that Gilbert started at Cavedog. I can't seem to find any screenshots on the internets, but I am pretty sure I may have saved them on some cd-rom back in the day when saving local copies of all kind of internet junk was a novel pastime and when hard drives were still small enough that they needed to be backed up every now and again. If anyone cares to see them, I could dig through stacks of ancient discs and retrieve them... ? ? ?

Wonkette was the only worthwhile one, and that one broke off from the mothership a few years ago.

I believe it will be available for everything under the sun, 'cause why not?

You can't possibly expect a teenager to go without fresh porn for a week.

Neat! This version has more urgency going for it but I liked the folksier version better. It was more fitting to a sordid tale of a lawless faraway place.

Woo, go me! I win the internet! And they said that it was impossible to have a constructive conversation about art in the context of video games!

Maybe they were ashamed by the sour reaction from the fan community. I dunno if Lucasforums or adventuregamers fell on their asses wowing at the thing, here people were somewhat nauseated.